Leading in a changing world

We analyzed data about our program of legal education and our performance in comparison to similarly positioned law schools. We reached out to alumni and employers to understand the changes underway in the legal profession and the knowledge and skills that will be needed by future Emory Law graduates.

OUR STRATEGIC PLAN necessarily addresses challenges not only from the ongoing transformation of the legal profession, but also those brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the deep societal concerns about racial and social justice. To meet these and other challenges, it was not enough for us to develop a plan that makes only incremental changes. Our students, alumni, and community deserve transformative change.

Fortunately, we approached these challenges from a position of strength. Our faculty and our research centers are nationally and inter-nationally recognized for their contributions to the dialogue on a range of critical issues. We have a committed group of adjunct and clinical faculty who are dedicated to preparing our students to excel in the prac-tice of law. We have a vibrant public service and public interest program that enables our students to make contributions to society while in law school and in their future careers.

Our connections within Emory University, one of the world’s leading research universities, are another strength. We are able to partner with our colleagues across disciplines in business, health, medicine, and the humanities to develop cutting-edge research and policy propos-als for the significant challenges we face as a society. We recognize that effective lawyering may sometimes require expertise in another field and so offer students the opportunity to obtain joint degrees in law and other disciplines, such as business, public health, and theology.

Emory University maintains active partnerships with many of the city’s preeminent institutions, such as The Carter Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Center for Civil and Human Rights, CARE, and The Georgia Institute of Technology. We can partner with institutions such as these, as well as Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center (which includes Emory Healthcare) to develop a world-class health law program. We can seize the opportunity created by the new John Lewis Chair of Civil Rights and Social Justice to create a new center focused on addressing the challenges of racial and social injustice in our community.

A snapshot of the complete plan follows and includes our seven overarching goals. On our website, you can find the series of initiatives or action steps that we are taking to realize those goals. The plan pro-vides a roadmap and outlines our priorities for the foreseeable future. We will report back regularly to our community about our progress in implementing our plans and in meeting our goals. We are already moving forward with many initiatives across the law school. Yet we also understand that this plan’s ambitious vision of Emory Law’s national leadership and global impact will require securing additional resources to support a range of activities, includ-ing student scholarships and financial aid, faculty renewal, curricular innovation, and community impact. The strategic plan will provide a foundation for our new campaign to attract transformative investments by alumni and other friends of Emory Law. 

VISION

Emory Law will continue to be a national and global leader in legal education by welcoming and supporting a diverse law school community, by carrying out pathbreaking and influential scholarship, and by offering exceptional teaching and practical learning opportunities that enable our alumni to become respected professionals and leaders in a rapidly changing world. Together, our community will work to secure a more fair and just society by advancing the rule of law.

MISSION

Through scholarship, teaching, service, and immersion in the world and its communities, Emory Law’s mission is to:

• Prepare students for a variety of careers and ever-changing legal, political, social, and market conditions by providing intellectually challenging and rewarding educational opportunities that integrate theory, doctrine, and experiential learning and that encourage the development of resilient, life-long learners.

• Develop future leaders who will serve the community through roles in law firms, the judiciary, government, legal education, corpo-rations, public interest organizations, and pro bono work.

• Instill in students an appreciation of service so they incorporate public service, public interest, and pro bono work into their careers.

• Produce scholarship that impacts the development of academic disciplines, policy, and legal practice, and that addresses the role of law in meeting society’s greatest challenges.

• Build and maintain a community based on integrity, mutual respect, and professionalism, and promote a culture of antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion for students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

• Collaborate with other disciplines within the university, alumni, the legal profession, the city of Atlanta, and the wider world to advance the rule of law and the resulting benefits of accountability, individual rights, social justice, thriving markets, economic development, and environmental resiliency.

CORE VALUES

1. A continuing commitment to excellence that seeks to maximize the potential of students, faculty, and staff.

2. Integrity and professionalism in all that we do both inside and outside the law school.

3. An intellectual community that fosters respect, collegiality, and collaboration in our scholarship, teaching, learning, and service.

4. Inclusivity in the recruitment, retention, and support of students, faculty, and staff to build and sustain a community of diverse backgrounds, traditions, heritages, and perspectives.

5. An engaged, dynamic community that approaches challenges within the changing legal profession and greater society with creativity, transparency, innovation, and a commitment to public service.

GOALS

1. Revise our curriculum and course of study to meet the challenges of rapid changes in law and the legal profession to prepare our students for productive and rewarding careers.

Now, more than ever, new lawyers are expected to be practice-ready when they begin their careers. Technological advancements and client concerns about costs have resulted in a loss of training opportunities for new lawyers and have spawned an industry of non-lawyers providing services once provided by lawyers. While we will always provide our students with a deep foundation in the law and legal reasoning, we must also update our curriculum and program of legal education to offer experiential opportunities so that our students can meet the needs of law firms and businesses that will employ them. We plan to create new curricular path-ways to provide students with the knowledge and skills to succeed in specific fields and to enable students to market their skills more effectively to employers. Fortunately, we already have nationally recognized programs that are models for success. Our Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results (TI:GER) program, a collaboration between Emory Law and the Georgia Institute of Technology, brings together graduate students in law, business, science, and engineering to work on start-up projects to transform highly promising research into economi-cally viable projects. Similarly, our integrated Transactional Law and Skills Certificate cur-riculum consists of courses that build upon each other, culminating in a capstone course or transactional law externship. Our advocacy program offers broad learning in litigation skills and includes our signature Kessler-Eidson Program in Trial Techniques, required of all second-year students. These programs provide important learning models as we plan new curricular pathways for our students.

2. Build and maintain a diverse faculty that will, through its scholarship and teaching, position Emory Law to play a central role in addressing issues of critical importance to legal practice and our society.

In many ways, a great law school is measured by the achievements of its graduates and the influence of its faculty. Since our founding, Emory Law’s faculty have been prolific scholars, influencing academic research, public policy, and the leading issues of the day. Today, our faculty are recognized as experts in their far-ranging and diverse fields. Our faculty have also been active in collaborating on research and writing with faculty and researchers from other disciplines within the university. In this plan, we seek to continue to foster and celebrate the scholarly research and influence of all members of our faculty. Through our hiring, we will continue to build a diverse faculty who embrace our tradition of schol-arly excellence. We also seek to improve our student-faculty ratio by adding faculty and by providing chairs and other means to recog-nize and support our distinguished scholars. As we move forward, we will always recog-nize the role of our faculty members as teach-ers, mentors and role models for our students. We will provide the necessary support and training opportunities so they can develop new teaching methodologies and respond to changes in the legal profession and legal education to continue to prepare our students for success upon graduation. 

3. Support the development and recognition of broad themes of scholarly and educational activities in areas that build on the strengths of the university and our location in Atlanta, as a major economic center, a significant health care hub, and epicenter of the civil rights movement.

Equally importantly, we will focus on achiev-ing national profile and impact in three important areas of teaching and research where we have a competitive advantage due to our location in Atlanta and the strengths of Emory University. We will continue to build the prominence of our nationally-recognized corporate and transactional law program by leveraging Atlanta’s position as a leading economic center and our connection to Emory’s Goizueta Business School. Emory’s leadership in health research, delivery, and innovation, along with the presence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reinforces our focus on health care law and intellectual property. Finally, we understand that Emory Law’s location in Atlanta, one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement and the current base for major civil rights organizations, gives us the responsibility and the opportunity to expand and to enhance our research and teaching related to civil rights and social justice.

Much of Emory Law's impact and influence is carried out through our centers and programs, such as the Center for the Study of Law and Religion and the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative. These, and other academic centers, many of which are conducted in collaboration with other disciplines within the university, serve to produce influential research, enable students to focus on particular areas of the law, and offer forums where leading scholars and practitioners can consider and address important issues of the day.

We will continue to support and enhance the visibility of the work of these centers and programs as they address important academic, public policy, and practice-oriented issues, and help increase the reputation of Emory Law.

4. Develop supportive and collaborative student engagement and development programs that enable students to thrive while in law school and to succeed as they launch their chosen careers.

Law school can be a stressful and challenging experience for many students. The rigors of legal education can be compounded by concerns of students about passing the bar exam and obtaining jobs in a highly competitive environment.

While Emory Law fosters a collaborative environment and prepares students well for bar passage and their careers, we recognize the need to do more. We will enhance our academic advising program so students can more effectively plan to take courses related to their career interests.

We will take steps so that students can better understand potential career opportunities in various fields of law, as well as in public service and federal and state clerkships. We will ensure that our career services and public service programs are appropriately staffed and have the necessary resources to support our students as they seek career opportuni-ties of their choice upon graduation. We will also review our bar preparation programs and make changes as necessary so that the bar pas-sage rate for our students remains high.

5. Ensure that Emory Law incorporates access, antiracism, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in our hiring, admissions, student development and alumni engagement activities, and encourages and supports efforts to address these principles in teaching and research.

Through the work of our Barton Child Law and Policy Center, International Humanitarian Law Clinic, the Project on War, Security in Law Culture and Society, and other faculty- and student-led clinics, Emory Law has long been an active participant in social justice and human rights movements.

We have named Professor Darren Hutchinson, a leading civil rights scholar and advocate, the John Lewis Chair for Civil Rights and Social Justice. We will create a center on civil rights and social justice to conduct research, promote teaching, and offer policy solutions to these challenging issues. We will also ensure that our curriculum and pedagogy incorporate best practices for creating an inclusive environment for a diverse community.

In recent years, we have initiated training and programming to address racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion issues among our student, faculty, and staff. We recognize, however, that we must do much more to support these efforts more broadly within our community.

We also recognize that there is an imperative for the legal profession to become more diverse so that attorneys more accurately reflect society as a whole. Accordingly, we will intensify our efforts to increase the diversity of our student body and work with employers, alumni, and the Atlanta community as they seek to address the challenges of a lack of diversity in the legal profession. We will also work to increase the diversity of our faculty and staff.

6. Evaluate and, as appropriate, enhance the law school’s global engagement and the development and implementation of distinguished graduate programs.

As a global center for law, business, and innovation, Emory Law actively participates in the international arena. Our global reach includes partnerships and opportunities for research and teaching through participation in the Center for American Law Studies at the University of Warsaw law school and other ini-tiatives through the Center for International and Comparative Law and the Global Health Law and Policy Project. Students seek our prestigious David J. Bederman Fellowship in International Law to spend a summer at The Hague, and they work with the International Humanitarian Law Clinic to provide assistance to international tribunals, non-governmental organizations, and militaries around the world. Our faculty explore a range of global issues, from Sharia law to global intellectual property matters to the application of military and security law in outer space. Moving forward, we will implement initiatives in select markets around the world and will seek additional funding to support our faculty as they expand and promote their research and scholarship internationally as well as to incorporate global perspectives into their work.

We also believe it is important to extend our teaching beyond the traditional JD program for students in the U.S. We currently have vibrant graduate degree programs for international students and lawyers who seek to develop a greater understanding of U.S. law, and for employees in business, health, and the sciences for whom an understanding of law and regulation can enhance their knowledge and improve their career opportunities. Because we are well-positioned to meet these needs, we will review our current programs and augment them as conditions evolve, potentially adding new certificates or concentrations, as needed, by the changing legal market. We will also effectively support international students, so they become fully engaged, and feel fully welcomed, in our community. 

7. Enhance the law school’s operations and infrastructure to address future needs related to legal education and research and to support the initiatives in this plan.

It is critical that we have the appropriate infrastructure, operations processes, and staff support to successfully implement this plan. In particular, we do not believe that our current facility, as designed, meets the needs of legal education today. Not only is it challenging for us to accommodate in the building all programs that are carried out on campus, but we do not have adequate seminar and smaller classrooms for the large variety of courses we currently offer. Moving forward, we will look at facility alternatives so we can continue to provide our students with the experience they need and deserve.

We highly value our operations and support staff who help make our school run efficiently and effectively. We will invest in programs to ensure we continue to attract and retain a talented and diverse team moving forward.

We also recognize that an enhanced communications program will be needed not only to help promote our school and accomplishments, but also to assist in raising funds for some of the initiatives in this plan. We will enhance communications for our alumni and friends to ensure their ongoing engagement in the life of the law school, through mentoring, moot court judging, externship hosting, and participation in our programs.

The Emory Law community has been energized by the opportunity to engage in a rigorous and thoughtful strategic planning process. We are grateful for the active participation of faculty, staff, students, Law Advisory Board members, Law Alumni Board members, and other alumni leaders who have achieved distinction in law, business, government, and public service. Our new strategic plan has been strengthened by your contributions. We look forward to building Emory Law’s future together.

 

 

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